how to manually add accents to letters not in a font

Question

I have some Yoruba text I have to set. We're using Adobe Minion but it doesn't have some of the characters, for example S with dot below Ṣ and o with both an accent above and dot below ọ́ and these are in other fonts like Times. I could simply find a font similar ish to Minion that does have these characters (in italic) and hope readers don't notice, but I'm wondering if there's another way. I'm thinking I could use o and ' and then kern them, but is that possible with the dot?

I may have to use a different font just for these characters, but I haven't easily found a font that has all of the characters.

I'm hoping some of you have some brilliant fixes I'm just not seeing.

Joel Cherney · Accepted Answer

The problem is that the InDesign doc is using Minion whereas the Word doc is using Times New Roman. The characters are there in Word, but Minion in InDesign shows the typical box with an X for some of the characters. I hope that clarifies it.

That makes more sense. InDesign is rendering the characters just fine in fonts that have an appropriate set of glyphs, you're just finding out that your chosen font (Minion) doesn't have the necessary combining diacritics. In your shoes, I personally would stop using Minion and shift to a font that actually supports the glyphs I'd need to work in a given language, but you could easily just manually kern stuff into place, or alternately use Peter's script that automates a lot of the manual kerning work.

If you don't already read Yoruba, I'd encourage you to think about switching to a font that supports your language. There are quite a few of them out there; it's just a technology that Adobe fonts don't seem to use, typically. There's no wy to search fonts.adobe.com for fonts that have support for Yoruba, and there's no way (so far as I know) to search for fonts that have combining diacriticals. So in your shoes, I'd personally switch to something generic from Microsoft (many of MS Typography's fonts support combining diacriticals) or perhaps a font like Gentium from SIL, that was made to support such languages, and has a very wide array of combining diacricial marks. But if you're wedded to Myriad, seems to me that we've already established that learning how to use Peter's compositon script is the least bad way for you to proceed.

Joel Cherney · Answer

The last time I had to typeset Yoruba, I simply used very generic Microsoft fonts that contained combining accents. For example, I can key in an o-with-acute and then add a Combining Dot Below. Times New Roman plus a few percent of horizontal type distortion doesn't look that different from Minion. It has fully italics, and the combiners tend to work just fine with the italic face. I chose this because I knew there were going to be users of the document downstream from me that might try something like copying my typeset text out of InDesign (or PDF, perhaps) and pasting it into another document, or a database field, or something along those lines.

If you must use an Adobe font, I don't think any of them really implement combining diacritical marks. When I have labored under client requirements to use a particular font that lacked support for an extended-Latin target language, I have kerned accents into place. It's been a few years since I've had to do that, and it can be awkward & challenging to use. Also, kerning accents into place doesn't survive being copied out of your doc and pasted into Word.

I found Peter's script easy to use, after reading the documentation. I set up the "underdot" character style, then when I ran the script, I pasted in an o-with-acute with an exclamation point into the dialog:

ó!

I had to fine-tune the positioning of the underdot character style, but it seemed to work fine. What this does is speed character entry, and I honestly never type much of anything; instead, translators hand it off to me in Whatever Font Works for Them, and then I get to figure out how to typeset it. So in this case, I'd personally be using the FindChangeByList script. However, if you're personally keying Yoruba into InDesign, and you don't have the freedom to go and pick a font with combining diacritical marks, then maybe Peter's Compose script is the best choice for you.

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